I should hardly be so hard on myself, however, as it was 25 years ago when my most head-scratching, unsolved mystery occurred. As mentioned elsewhere, when I worked at my second radio station, 1430AM WBRB back in Michigan, I was given a good deal of freedom in the weeknight slot, 7 to midnight. I hosted a nightly feature, which might be anything from playing different tracks by Van Morrison every 30 minutes or so to spotlighting a then-new album (one night it was Stevie Wonder's Characters, another it was Linda Ronstadt's all-Spanish Canciones de mi Padre).
Sometime in 1987 or early 1988, I decided to feature a group that's definitely not a fave rave, Jay & the Americans. They were probably selected because I'm a sucker for almost any 1960s artifact, and had recently run across their hits album that I'd found for two bucks when Peaches Records went out of business in the early '80s.
Anyway, the day the feature was to air, I got ready to leave for the station, and the album I had set aside was missing. After searching a short while, I became frantic and began looking in the most absurd locations: Was I out in the garage to get something, and left it out there? Nope. Was I in a totally mindless state and put it in the refrigerator? No, not there, either.
The mystery was never solved. Has it ever shown up in all those album crates I brought with me to Washington state almost 20 years ago? No. Just because I hate to lose stuff,
I was happy to find a Jay & the Americans anthology (on Rhino Records) that was actually a better package than the previous one; I purchased the LP a few years after that still-puzzling incident. As for the content, well...the "operatic" "Cara Mia" never impressed me--sounds corny. Their remake of the Ronettes' gorgeous "Walking In the Rain" is flat-out awful. "Let's Lock the Door (And Throw Away the Key)" is nostalgia and nothing more, as it's the first Jay & the Americans song I caught on the radio. For me, the group's one moment worth hearing again is the instrumental break in "Come a Little Bit Closer," as it reminds me of the E Street Band at their jolliest.
Absolutely weird--how did that record just vanish into the ether? If someone from another world summoned a copy of that album, their musical taste is worse than mine.